i have a WD Caviar Black 640G harddisk that i bought 18 months ago in a usb2 Elements enclosure. it worked fine. now when i take it out of the enclosure and connect it via SATA it is not seen. neither fdisk nor blkid nor gparted see anything.

is there some HarryPotter incantation i can use to get this to work?

a new Hitachi Deskstar 1T goes back and forth between the WD usb2 enclosure and SATA no problem.

ps now that i think of it, Western Digital probably didn't want people pulling these out and using them as internal drives. the price was very low, actually LESS than the bare drive. i was very surprised when i threw caution (and warranty) to the wind and cracked open the enclosure. surprised at the quality of the drive included.